PORTSMOUTH
Engineering excellence and innovative technologies, makes McLaren Automotive’s Portsmouth operation one of the most advanced of its kind anywhere in the world.
As the centre of McLaren Automotive’s expertise for carbon fibre component production the facility assembles the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren carbon fibre bodyshell, or ‘body-in-white’.
The operation was originally formed to produce carbon fibre parts for the McLaren F1 road car but moved to Portsmouth to accommodate a larger facility in order to meet the technical and volume demands for the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren.
ASSEMBLY & OPERATIONS
The Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren begins life at our Portsmouth facility before being sent to Woking to be transformed into a fully functioning super sports car.
Portsmouth focuses on the complex, high-precision assembly process and makes the most critical of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren’s carbon fibre components, to ensure vehicle integrity and performance characteristics.
In producing the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren our production engineers and assembly staff have had to overcome the challenge of tolerance control and, in addition, combine composite materials to their best design and process capability. This is because much of the monocoque (body) requires tolerances of just plus or minus 0.5mm or less. With a jig build cycle of less than five hours per car, it is crucial that everything comes together right, first time.
CRITICAL COMPONENTS
In this respect, the most critical feature of the entire bodyshell is the ‘spider’ (roof & body pillar frame). This is the one piece framework of the upper safety cell that gets its name from its spidery shape.
Along with the front crash structure, this is one of two components wholly manufactured in-house by McLaren Automotive. It is by far the most challenging part to make. Not only does it have a complex geometry, including a large number of joints and contact points, but extra strength must be built in at various points to take the crash and vehicle roll-over loads.
The spider is assembled using 180 separate plies of dry carbon fibre laid up at various points in the spider, with different kinds of material in different places and thicknesses so as to take specific load cases. EPP beads are injected at 1 second at a pressure of 6 bar. This forces the carbon fibre reinforcement tight to the mould while epoxy resin is injected into it, then it is heated in an oven to harden the resin.
Portsmouth consistently builds and delivers 15 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren bodies per week, quite an achievement for a hand-built composite structure of such complexity.
The Portsmouth facility is just a further example of how McLaren is able to leverage its expertise in the world of Formula One and translate technology directly to our road cars.
